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The military

Petraeus aide, now Ohio State professor, critiques Iraq ‘surge’

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoPhoto courtesy of Peter R. MansoorIn 2007 and 2008, then-Col. Peter R. Mansoor, left, served as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus, the commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq.

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During the “surge” of troop levels in Iraq, a man who is now an Ohio State University professor
decided when late-night incidents were important enough to wake Gen. David Petraeus.

The same professor was near Petraeus, just off camera taking notes, when the general had his
weekly secure video conferences with President George W. Bush. The professor helped draft the
general’s testimony to Congress in 2007 and sat behind him while he delivered it.

Professor Peter R. Mansoor was Col. Peter R. Mansoor in 2007 and 2008. As executive officer to
the commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq, he served as Petraeus’ gatekeeper,
consigliere and “hatchet man.”

Mansoor, 53, of Dublin, had intended to delay writing a book about that experience and his view
of the surge. He wanted more distance from the events, and he wanted to wait until certain
documents had been declassified, he said in an interview last week. But during a 2010 conference
with experts in counterinsurgency, Mansoor realized that these experts weren’t clear on what the
surge accomplished.

“No one had a holistic view of what had happened,” he said. “It was like the story of the blind
men who feel the elephant. One feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake; another one feels the leg
and thinks it’s a tree.”

Mansoor — who came to Ohio State to fill the Gen. Raymond E. Mason Jr. chair in military history
in September 2008, just after leaving Iraq — wanted to change that. So he requested that some of
Petraeus’ papers be declassified and went to work.

The result is
Surge: My Journey With General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War, to be
published today by Yale University Press. It’s the first history of the surge written by a member
of Petraeus’ staff. Petraeus wrote the book’s foreword.

The “surge” was the strategy adopted by Bush in 2007 that sent an extra 25,000 troops to Iraq on
top of the 130,000 or so already there. The idea was that the extra troops could help reduce
sectarian violence, protect the Iraqi people and give Iraqi leaders breathing room to rebuild.

It was more complicated than that, in Mansoor’s telling. To begin with, the whole Iraq war “was
badly begun for nebulous reasons,” he said last week.

At times in the book, Mansoor criticizes the Bush of the early years of the war, along with
then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Coalition Authority head L. Paul Bremer, then-commander
of U.S. Central Command Adm. William Fallon and various American politicians, many of them
Democrats.

He praises Petraeus (a kind of hero of the book), Bush of the war’s later years, Ambassador Ryan
Crocker, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno (now the Army chief of staff) and a number of other military
officers.

The surge worked, even if it was “the best of a lot of bad options,” Mansoor said last week. But
people don’t understand how or why it worked, and a number of myths about it have cropped up, he
said. In talks he gives about the book, he tries to combat them.

For example, some suggest that the surge was simply a way to allow the U.S. to get out of Iraq.
That’s not true, Mansoor said. His time with Petraeus, and his access to communications with the
president and other strategists, showed him that leaders wanted stability in Iraq and planned to
stay there until it was achieved.

“It’s a balanced account and recognizes what the surge did and what it didn’t do,” said Conrad
Crane, the lead author of the counterinsurgency manual used in Iraq and the chief of historical
services at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center. “There’s a lot of stuff in there I didn’t
know,” Crane said.

And, he pointed out, the surge will continue to be controversial. Most notably, Army Col. Gian
Gentile has critiqued the “triumph narrative” of the surge in articles and in his book
Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency, published this year.

Mansoor said he wrote the book as a professional historian who also participated in many of the
events he describes. He wrote what he could prove — not an apology for the war, not a political
tract, he said.